華西のマンチェスター : 沙市と四川市場

Abstract

Before the vast flow of the products of cotton industry into from abroad, Shashi, the city in the middle Yangzi basin, had nearly exclusively supplied native cotton goods to Sichuan. The hand woven cotton cloth, or Jingzhou cotton cloth 荊州布, made in rural region of western Hupei, and raw cotton produced in Hupei, Jiangsu and Zhejiang went up to Sichuan via Shashi. The market scale there was presumably much larger than Osaka during the same period, which was the reason Shashi was called 'the Manchester in Western China'. Indian machine-spun cotton yarn, which flowed explosively into Sichuan during 1890's, had driven away almost two-thirds of native cotton goods (viz., it is estimated at 600, 000 piculs in cotton yarn) in only ten years. But in the 20th century, the exchange rate of copper cash to silver tael on which consumer price in export goods depended so rapidly declined that the superiority of Indian yarn to native one in respect to cost was lost. Accordingly, in cotton-goods distribution from Shashi to Sichuan, while Jingzhou cloth as manufactured goods disappeared, Hupei raw cotton as material of hand-spun cotton yarn continued to amount almost to in the late 19th century in spite of fluctuation of its amount. In 1920's, modern textile industry, beginning to be formed on the coast, demanded with rapid a lot of high count cotton yarn. On the other hand, while the competition between hand-spun yarn and low count machine-spun yarn remained in Sichuan, Shashi, around which New World species of cotton were newly produced for cotton mills established in coastal areas, became the supply market of raw cotton for lower Yangzi. It was in 1920's that the change caused by the modernization in the old market structure in China brought about new inter-regional difference.